Coloring Outside The Lines

JULY 1, 2010 - SEPTEMBER 26, 2010

Press Release

OPENING RECEPTION: 1ST THURSDAY, JULY 1, 2010, FROM 5 - 8PM

SULLIVAN GOSS – An American Gallery is pleased to announce a new exhibition of paintings and pastels by one of LA’s best kept art secrets, Anders Aldrin. Praised and promoted by influential Los Angeles artists like Millard Sheets, Lorser Feitelson and Dan Lutz, Aldrin found greater success with museums and other arts organizations than he did with commercial galleries. His crushing shyness and his adoption of modernist painting didn’t make the going any easier.

Anders Aldrin (1889-1970) was born in the Varmland of Sweden and immigrated to the US via Ellis Island in 1911. Already, he was carrying the secret dream to be an artist, but he didn’t get a chance to pursue his dream for over seven years. In 1918, Aldrin joined the army to fight in the Great War and was shipped off to France where he contracted tuberculosis. Subsequently, he was sent to Prescott, Arizona to recuperate. While in the hospital, Aldrin began to draw.

In 1923, Aldrin and his young family relocated to Los Angeles, where he enrolled in Otis Art Institute. Creative and highly industrious, Aldrin was soon selected as a star pupil. Upon his graduation, he was offered a scholarship to study at the Santa Barbara School of Art. That same year, he almost certainly came across the work of painters Alexej Jawlensky, Paul Klee, Lyonel Feininger and Wassily Kandinsky at the Los Angeles Museum of History, Science and Art (now LACMA). Convinced of the exciting possibilities innate in the strange Fauvist colors of painters like Jawlensky and Klee, Aldrin set his course.

Over the next forty plus years, Aldrin managed to paint a substantial and unique body of work despite the financial difficulties of the Great Depression, the conservative nature of the LA art market, and his relative isolation from the styles and manners of his contemporaries. He never colored inside the lines.

Since his death in 1970, important solo exhibitions have been organized at the Laguna Art Museum, the Monterey Museum of Art and the Riverside Art Museum. Emerging interest in the development of modern art in California has focused a new light on the contributions of artists like Aldrin. Sullivan Goss is proud to represent the Estate of the Artist.